On set with Ken Loach: is this really the final cut?

There's been talk of Jimmy's Hall – which premieres at Cannes today – being Ken Loach's last feature. But a visit to its Irish set finds the 77-year-old director on fighting form despite his failing eyesight

Thu 22 May 2014 02.00 EDT
First published on Thu 22 May 2014 02.00 EDT

Drive east from Sligo into County Leitrim and the view becomes a sweep of green the Irish postcard industry would reject as cliched. As Rebecca O'Brien navigates the country lanes, she recalls how back in 2012 she heard from Ken Loach. By then, she had produced 13 of his films. At the time, he was at work in London on a documentary, The Spirit of '45 "and he said he couldn't see properly".

Bemoaning his health was unlike Loach. He was going to go to Moorfields Eye hospital, just to be on the safe side. They spoke again later. The doctors had told him the sight in his left eye was lost. A blocked vein in the retina. The same thing could happen to the right at any time.

"It's his blood pressure," O'Brien says. She turns down a track until the track runs out. "He's 77, you know?"

It is now the summer of 2013, and on a small patch of land outside the village of Dromahair stands a single-storey building of corrugated iron. The ground beneath it is bog. This is the set of Loach's new film, Jimmy's Hall. The whole thing was flatpacked – built in Glasgow, then shipped for reassembly.

Inside, Loach peers through the dinge in a cagoule. "Hello there," he says. "Are you sure you should be wearing white shoes?"

Two weeks earlier, O'Brien announced that Jimmy's Hall is likely to be Loach's last film. The Jimmy of the title is James Gralton, a communist thorn in the side of Ireland's Catholic establishment during the 1920s and 30s. The hall was a space where the local population could read, write and most of all dance, free from the threat of what scriptwriter Paul Laverty calls the "theological gulag".

Loach ponders the scene and cleans his glasses. Those with no idea of what he looks like might struggle to identify this modest figure as one of the world's most exalted film-makers, or the red devil loathed by rightwing pundits from Michael Gove down. As movie sets go, the mood is remarkably calm. The cinematographer is the acclaimed Robbie Ryan, tall and absorbed. (He also shot the 2012 comedy The Angel's Share for Loach.) Loach is shooting on film, not digitally, as always. He and Ryan discuss technical matters in shorthand. "So with the – yes – you know, using the – yes. Exactly."

Really? "Yes, as a young actor I was the understudy in a revue show he was starring in," Loach says. "He could be very nice. We shared an interest in history, so we swapped books on medieval stuff. But he could be capricious. Sometimes he just cut you dead."

The past often comes up. "It's not nostalgia. It's physical. The older you get the more new memories get wiped out, and you end up remembering more about your early life than what you did last week."

In the scene to come, a sceptical Ward will emerge from the dusty hall to be persuaded by friends to reopen it. Finally, he relents. "Life's too short," he says. "We haven't a choice, do we?"

On "Cut", Loach dives into conference with Paul Laverty. A slight Glaswegian in a baseball cap, Laverty is a former lawyer and human-rights campaigner who spent much of the 80s in Sandinista Nicaragua. This is the 11th film he has written for Loach.

The green fields of Co Leitrim are the backdrop for Jimmy's Hall. Photograph: Joss Barratt

The production has been big news in Co Leitrim. A would-be paparazzo descended on the first day. The Leitrim Observer has brimmed with excitement. Loach and Laverty have made use of the attention. The director has vocally supported local anti-fracking protests; Laverty turned up in the Irish press decrying the CIA's director John Brennan, now visiting his family seat in nearby Roscommon.

Back in Sligo, Laverty buys coffee for us both. I tell him it's unusual to see a writer on a set – even more so being consulted between takes. "I know. Most writers just hand over the script. But we're not enemies, Ken and me. We're soulmates."

Have they discussed Loach's retirement? "We talk about a lot of things. It's possible, I suppose." He stalls. Eventually, he says he wants Loach to enjoy his time however he chooses. "He's my mate first." Dizzyingly articulate on every other subject, Laverty stares into his coffee. "To be honest, I prefer not to think about it."

That evening, the lights from a Sligo pizzeria glint off the River Garavogue. Inside, Loach arrives after O'Brien and Laverty, smiling but clearly exhausted. A waitress makes a fuss of him. "We're in here most nights," he says. He grimaces at the tape recorder. I make notes instead. The conversation covers Fulham's prospects for the season, London arthouse cinemas employing staff on zero-hours contracts.

Over a Fiorentina, he turns to politics. "The left have to capture people's anger, or we're in for a very dark time." I can't tell if he's mournful or just knackered. I say that when it was an option I voted for the Socialist Alliance, the now-defunct party he backed as an alternative to Labour. He beams. "Very good! The thing is, it's much easier to be a rightwing populist than a leftwing one, because the left always have to explain why things are the way they are. The right can just blame the foreigners."

Eventually I crack, and blurtingly ask about his eye. "Oh, it's not a big thing really," he says, apparently unoffended. "I just touch wood the other one will be OK." He lays a hand on the table, says it hasn't made much difference to directing. "Work isn't too bad. It's just when I pour tea I do it all over the tablecloth. And I bump into people walking down Oxford Street."

Last to arrive, Loach is first to leave. Tomorrow starts early. O'Brien says this is the problem: "A shoot means being on top form, 12 hours a day for six weeks." There were worries even this might be a film too far. It's not just his eyes. On the first day of his last fictional movie, The Angel's Share, he stumbled in the catering tent. "It wasn't an old man fall. He just tripped. But he wrenched his stomach. It took weeks to heal. It all takes its toll," she says.

The next morning, I sit on a minibus crowded with teenagers in 30s costume, mostly local farm kids. I'm the oldest person here by many decades, until Loach gets on board.

"Is that Ken Loach?" says a dark-haired boy in a ragged suit. "He looks like he's about to keel over." He does seem deeply Mr Chips-ish. "You all know the dance," he tells them, "but you're going to be doing it a lot. So pace yourselves."

Soon 50 kids are gathered at the junction of two lanes, a few with drums and violins, the rest set to perform a "crossroads dance" – an outdoor reel popular among 30s youth with nothing to do and nowhere to do it. Down the road, Barry Ward stands waiting with a donkey. Its name is Kibundi, for reasons no one is sure of.

Loach stands on an upturned crate. On his cue, the band strikes up and the kids launch into a knees-up, while from the other direction comes Kibundi. By the time the local postman rides, stunned, into frame on his bike, Robbie Ryan already has the shot.

But Loach spends the next hour honing, tweaking. There are more cryptic exchanges with Ryan, instructions to the dancers: "Remember, you've had a glass or two." He turns to an assistant: "Can we tell the lad on the bodhran to give it some welly?"

The only time I see him in even vague bad humour is when a wardrobe assistant tries to neaten a dancer's hair. "Oh, bloody leave it," he mutters, mostly to himself. By the end, his coaxings have made the dance wilder, the scene like life. Every time he's teetered down from his crate, breath has been held – but he looks elated. "Can we tempt you into a dance?" he asks me.

Months later, I meet him again in a top-floor room in Soho. Here he's editing the film with another longtime collaborator, Jonathan Morris. They sit at an old school Steenbeck editing desk, the reel of film tense between nylon rollers. At Morris's side are scissors and tape. Loach says that making physical cuts in physical film focuses the mind. "But the infrastructure is vanishing," Morris says. The only place they can watch their rough cut is Warner Brothers' London headquarters. Loach thinks they keep the 35mm projector at the behest of Christopher Nolan.

By chance, the scene they're working on is the one I saw outside the hall. In Ireland, it looked a little creaky. Now, it has a cinematic sheen.

The official line about Loach's retirement has softened lately, with hints about more documentaries or even small-scale fictions. His plans for the summer extend, he says, as far as watching the World Cup. "I'm not sure I've got another one in me, Danny. It depends what time I think about it. In the morning it's 'Never again.' By evening it's 'Well, maybe...'"

On the Steenbeck's monitor, Barry Ward stands in front of Jimmy's hall. "Life's too short," he says as the rollers whirr. "We haven't a choice, do we?"

• Jimmy's Hall premieres at Cannes today and is released in the UK on 30 May